In Wartime
Stories from Ukraine
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
From one of the finest journalists of our time comes a definitive, boots-on-the-ground dispatch from the front lines of the conflict in Ukraine.
“Essential for anyone who wants to understand events in Ukraine and what they portend for the West.”—The Wall Street Journal
Ever since Ukraine’s violent 2014 revolution, followed by Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the country has been at war. Misinformation reigns, more than two million people have been displaced, and Ukrainians fight one another on a second front—the crucial war against corruption.
With In Wartime, Tim Judah lays bare the events that have turned neighbors against one another and mired Europe’s second-largest country in a conflict seemingly without end.
In Lviv, Ukraine’s western cultural capital, mothers tend the graves of sons killed on the other side of the country. On the Maidan, the square where the protests that deposed President Yanukovych began, pamphleteers, recruiters, buskers, and mascots compete for attention. In Donetsk, civilians who cheered Russia’s President Vladimir Putin find their hopes crushed as they realize they have been trapped in the twilight zone of a frozen conflict.
Judah talks to everyone from politicians to poets, pensioners, and historians. Listening to their clashing explanations, he interweaves their stories to create a sweeping, tragic portrait of a country fighting a war of independence from Russia—twenty-five years after the collapse of the USSR.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With this fascinating and often grim portrait of Ukraine, Judah, a journalist who previously covered the Balkan wars, contributes to a greater Western understanding of the country since the Maidan revolution, Russia's capture of Crimea, and the Russian-backed uprising in the eastern Donbass region in 2014. This work stands out by splitting the difference between a purely journalistic account and a scholarly analysis. Judah offers a compassionate human view of these conflicts, mixing personal stories, history, politics, and reportage to document "what Ukraine is really like and what its people have to say." He travels through the country's distinct regions and shares anecdotes from a number of people he encounters there, including academics, government officials, teachers, doctors, and more colorful characters such as a "turbocharged" 59-year-old zookeeper and an 87-year-old "bomb shelter poet." Judah describes a vast, complex society in the midst of an uncertain, frozen conflict, and a country rife with corruption, political and ethnic divisions, and misinformation. Despite clearly evident splits in loyalties and a wide range of opinions on the current situation, ordinary people are often more concerned with their immediate needs than geopolitical struggles. Judah's special and timely book will provide lay readers with an apt introduction to Ukraine, and specialists will appreciate its atypical yet enlightening approach and its insights into the social aspects of ongoing conflicts. Maps & photos.
